(ST. LOUIS): The Missouri Botanical Garden and their partner organizations are pleased to announce a designer has been selected for the project “Purposeful Gaming and the BHL” which will serve to improve access to texts in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) through online gaming. Dartmouth College’s Tiltfactor was selected as designer. The Garden is working with Harvard University, Cornell University and The New York Botanical Garden on the project.

Tiltfactor has extensive experience designing games for the educational sector. They have worked with crowdsourcing metadata by engaging players in games that help improve access to archival content found in cultural heritage institutions. Teams from all four institutions along with developers from Tiltfactor will begin working on the game immediately, with hope of releasing it in 2015. Trish Rose-Sandler, of the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Center for Biodiversity Informatics, will serve as coordinator.

In November 2013, the Garden was awarded a $449,641 grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to test new means of using crowdsourcing and gaming to support the enhancement of texts in the BHL, which contains more than 40 million pages of scanned texts making it the single largest open-licensed source of biodiversity literature in the world. Digital libraries, such as the BHL, are hampered by poor output from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software making it difficult to search for specific text. “Purposeful Gaming and the BHL” will demonstrate whether or not online games are a successful tool for analyzing and improving digital outputs. Learn more about project details at http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Purposeful+Gaming.

The Missouri Botanical Garden’s mission is “to discover and share knowledge about plants and their environment in order to preserve and enrich life.” Today, 155 years after opening, the Missouri Botanical Garden is a National Historic Landmark and a center for science, conservation, education and horticultural display.

The Missouri Botanical Garden is located at 4344 Shaw Blvd. in St. Louis, just south of I-44 at Vandeventer-Kingshighway (exit #287B). Open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Closed Christmas Day. Grounds open at 7 a.m. most Wednesdays and Saturdays (exception: special admission rate events). Admission is $8; free children ages 12 and under and Garden members. St. Louis City and County residents are $4 and free most Wednesdays and Saturdays until noon (exception: special admission rate events – third weekend of May, Memorial Day 2012, Labor Day weekend and first weekend of October). Park for free on site and two blocks west at the Shaw-Vandeventer intersection. The Garden is accessible via public transportation by taking the MetroLink commuter rail line and picking up a Metro bus (www.metrostlouis.org). For general information, log on to www.mobot.org or call the 24-hour recording at (314) 577-5100 or 1-800-642-8842. For membership information, visit www.mobot.org/membership call (314) 577-5118 during weekday business hours. For volunteer opportunities, visit www.mobot.org/volunteer or call (314) 577-5187. The Missouri Botanical Garden is a tobacco-free environment.

About the Institute of Museum and Library ServicesThe Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. Our mission is to inspire libraries and museums to advance innovation, lifelong learning, and cultural and civic engagement. Our grant making, policy development, and research help libraries and museums deliver valuable services that make it possible for communities and individuals to thrive. To learn more, visit www.imls.gov and follow IMLS on FacebookandTwitter.